Posted by team_fapn on 3/11/2013 12:55:00 PM (view original):Here's the way i see it:

Talent should win 100% of the time. Now, at what margin is talent not able to be overcome? If your OL average is 60, and the DL avg is 60, and your RB avg is 60 and the LB avg is 60, THEN it should fall back on gameplanning. So if the opponent is playing heavy pass against always run, then that run should get a pretty good gain. On the flipside, if all things are equal, and its always run vs always run, then what? Its a 0 yard gain? Or a -1 yard run to +2 yard run?

On the other hand, a team that is more than +10 or 15 across the board on their opponent should be able to have their way with them, regardless of the gameplan. How often do we see App State beat Michigan? Even if they gameplan perfectly? Not that often, right? because in the end, the talent will win. You can gameplan until your brain explodes, but if you don't have the personnel to pull it off, then the majority of the time, it won't happen... except that 1 in 50 time that it does...

Examples based on the current build of this beta:

RATINGS -

QB (1)46.0 /34.0-

OL (5)52.4/ 55.4-

RB (2)49.0/48.0-

WR (2)51.0/51.0-

TE (1)45.0/56.0-

DL (4)49.5/51.3-

LB (4)50.5/48.8-

DB (4)45.5/50.5

The first number for each position is my opponent, the 2nd is me. He had a decided advantage at QB, and I had one at TE... other than that, it was pretty even across the board. My OL was 6 points better than his DL. His OL was 1 point better than my DL. I rushed for 226, he for 128. I avg 5.0 ypc, he avg 3.3 ypc. I won 21-3

Now, on the other hand... in this second example, using the gp I used to beat 80% of the test games I ran vs d3 opponents that were similar to me, this is against a d2 school. The smallest differential that he had was +2 (his dbs vs my wrs), the largest was 18 (his OL vs my DL)... He rushed for 320 yards on 48 carries... I rushed for 150 on 37. I did manage to throw for 200, but thats because my gameplan changed to my losing gp, which is heavy on the pass. and my qb was 21/59 passing... he also threw 5 ints and only 1 td. Lost 54-14

I can understand WHY i lost that game. And it doesn't **** me off. If I come up against a team that has me outmanned, I wouldn't expect to win because I am (or am not in my case) a genius gameplanner.

All that being said, here is where I think it should land: 80% talent, 17% gameplanning, 3% luck/upset factor. Talent should be king if this is going to be a true "SIMULATION" of college football. Recruiting/talent should mean more than gameplanning and/or luck. Gameplanning should mean more than luck. Luck should only be talked about 3-5 times a season, OVERALL, not 3-5 times a day. I simulated that game between myself and a d2 team 100 times. I won ONCE. 24-21.

+1

Talent should be king! Ilike the following breakdown:85% talent
13% gameplanning
2% luck/upset

I think there is a 4th element: Execution
I can gameplan perfectly but maybe my gues arent deciplined enough to stick to the gameplan (GI? tech? formiq?)
would put it something like this:
Talent: 60
Gameplanning: 25
Execution: 15
Luck: zero. it makes no sense for there to be a luck element to this game beyond the single bug plays, pick6, return td, etc. no one is gonna 'get lucky' and have a 15 sack game because in rl the gameplannig would change once he his about 6 sacks. simialrly a qb would never get the change to throw his 10th int becuase he would be benched after 4.

Posted by beros100 on 3/12/2013 9:58:00 PM (view original):10% luck is just crazy....1%

10% luck (randomness is a better description) might actually be a little low, though not much. Think about this. Both offense & defense called run. A RB (Speed:90 Strength:90 Elusiveness:90) is carrying the ball and a LB (Speed:63 Strength:64 Tackling:63) is trying to make the tackle. How often should this LB be successful? If there was NO luck (or randomness) at all the LB would NEVER make the tackle. After all, the RB is more talented, right? Now...without ANY luck (or randomness), if the offensive team had a RB that was more talented than all of the defensive players he would score every time he touched the ball! Is this what we want? Didn't think so.
If I understand right (which is a BIG if) the better the player is the higher his chance of being successful in any given situation becomes, but regardless how good he is there has to ALWAYS be at least an outside chance of him being successful or there is no reason to play the game.

For coach deen's example: remember there are other things that are taken into account. If it was always 1 v 1 that RB should win every time in a computer sim. But you have to take fatigue, form IQ, play call, number of other players in the play, location of the play (brings in blocking etc), technique and now the individual talent is modified somewhat. Now Adrian Peterson vs John Q Public of Menlo College is going to win every time 1 v 1, and most likely the Minn 90 - 90 OL will push Menlo's 65 - 65 defense around and create big holes, but somewhere in that game sim Peterson will get tackled a few times. If we could see the results of a sim in which the characteristics of better player match-ups always wins (just by how much?) we could compare to how it is now. We have never seen that. We have only had normalized outcomes or contrived distributions to compare. I we had that comparison, yes, we may want to add some variable to make it not 100% that the top dog wins. But what I see here in this thread is that most coaches don't want results that aren't explainable or random or even too variable.

The real problem of "no randomness" is that we don't always have factors we can look at in the engine that represent all the factors we can see in real life. For instance, say a QB throws 3 passes right on target and then sails 3 passes over the target. Why does he pass well one time and miss the other? There could be all sorts of factors, but it could just be that he released the ball at the wrong time. We can attribute that particular action with ratings, like TECH or IQ, but those single numbers don't tell us which play this should happen on versus another play. I can't look at a TECH of 30 and flip the switch on one play versus the other just looking at the all the other numbers. I can't add up numbers and say "complete" vs "incomplete". When I talk about randomness in the engine, I am talking about these sorts of factors that we can only simulate through random checks, like a QB's throwing accuracy.

That doesn't go to say that we aren't looking at other factors within the play to come up with those random checks. A passing play will still look at how much pressure is on the QB, how open his target is, not to mention how deep the target is, but they all essentially boil down to checking to see if the QB throws the ball on target and that's always going to be a percentage chance. I don't think there is anything we can look at in the game that ends up with a "yes/no" condition check, but there are many places we limit the possible outcomes of different actions within the play.

I've tried to put some of these steps in the play in the "anatomy" type posts and even some in the "debug pbp" posts, so if you want to discuss this, I'm very open to doing so. There is a lot going on in the engine and I've been reworking a few parts of it related to this topic based on the initial feedback from beta. The good part about breaking the play down into steps and intermediate results is that you can look at this randomness in "bigger chunks" that allows a little more control on randomness of the net results, but it also makes it very difficult to test every combination of match ups and settings.

I'd also point out that I think a lot of times when people complain about randomness in the game, they are talking about the game results. It certainly seems random when a much higher rated team beats a lower rated team and there isn't anything to point to for the lower rated team that would justify the win. This is different than the randomness within a single play, but can be cause by it as is the case in 2.0. There will be randomness in the 3.0 engine within a single play, but with it being bounded by result sets, the probability that a lower rated team beats a higher rated team will be much lower. So while I'd say there has to be randomness in the engine, that doesn't mean I think there needs to be random upsets within the game.

"but with it being bounded by result sets, the probability that a lower rated team beats a higher rated team will be much lower."
Norbert, IF I'm understanding what you're saying, this may be the first time I completely disagree with you. What exactly does "bounded by result sets" mean? If it means that there is something in the engine that helps the better team win, I believe that's totally wrong. The game should be played one play at a time, and those plays should determine if a team wins or loses. Period. And oh yeah, I apologize ahead of time if I'm misunderstanding what you said! (LOL)

From the previous pbp conversation with Norbert - result sets are simply distribution possibilities tied to each decision point. What they do is skew towards the better player in a match-up but still gives a possibility of the result favoring the weaker player. Difference in 3.0 vs 2.0 is that in JConte's version the play ended at that point. With Norbert's version, unless the result is a definite win it may continue to the next step. Personally, I would still like to see what the game would be like if there were no distribution of possible results, only gradations of by how much the stronger match-up won by.

Posted by coach_deen on 3/13/2013 11:28:00 PM (view original):"but with it being bounded by result sets, the probability that a lower rated team beats a higher rated team will be much lower."
Norbert, IF I'm understanding what you're saying, this may be the first time I completely disagree with you. What exactly does "bounded by result sets" mean? If it means that there is something in the engine that helps the better team win, I believe that's totally wrong. The game should be played one play at a time, and those plays should determine if a team wins or loses. Period. And oh yeah, I apologize ahead of time if I'm misunderstanding what you said! (LOL)

Yes, by all means, lets hope there isn't something in the engine that helps the better team win. That would just be ridiculous. The coaches who recruit the best players don't deserve to win more games than everyone else.

Posted by coach_deen on 3/13/2013 11:28:00 PM (view original):"but with it being bounded by result sets, the probability that a lower rated team beats a higher rated team will be much lower."
Norbert, IF I'm understanding what you're saying, this may be the first time I completely disagree with you. What exactly does "bounded by result sets" mean? If it means that there is something in the engine that helps the better team win, I believe that's totally wrong. The game should be played one play at a time, and those plays should determine if a team wins or loses. Period. And oh yeah, I apologize ahead of time if I'm misunderstanding what you said! (LOL)

Yes, it's probably a misunderstanding between game results and play results. When I talk about game results, I am talking about final scores and upsets and that sort of thing. When I talk about play results, I am talking about each individual play. In 3.0, we break those play results down into smaller components based on the ball moving down field, the blocking match up, the tackle attempt match up, and the actual tackle match up. These all piece together to tell how far down the field a player gets on an individual play. In a passing play, there are additional steps taken to simulate the pass. Within each of these smaller components there are match up comparisons and results. For instance, we'll look at how the blocking matches up at the line when the rusher starts rushing behind the line and we'll give that match up a results of 5 possible outcomes - offense wins, offense is favored, equal, defense is favored, and defense wins. When I say bounded results, I am talking about these results, so there may be a case where the defense has such an advantage on the offense, better ratings, more players, etc., that we bound the results to "defense is favored" or "defense wins". Now just as this was determined by several different factors, this results will now feed into other checks - the most immediate is if the defense makes a tackle attempt and there will be a similar type of results for that.

In this way, we can favor the stronger team on each play without allowing a tackle for a loss every play or a 80-yard run each play.

What this also means is that when we have equal teams, that component of the match up will tend towards equal allowing the formation match ups to make more of a difference. It also means that a pretty close team might have a chance of turning a few plays their way with the right game planning.

What we don't mess with is the game results. Those are always just the result of all the plays within the game. We never try to force one team to win over another.

Whew! (LOL) Norbert, thanks for helping this not so smart Texas boy get it! Honestly, my initial thinking was correct, but I did misunderstand what you meant by "bounded by results". Thanks for clearing it up!